The planning

The group of kids stood around making plans. They decided to play PJ Masks. Everyone was assigned a part. Then the discussion turned to the different powers. One girl emerge early as the leader, she had dressed up as Owlette for Halloween so the others deferred to her. “Listen to me, stop talking. We all get all the powers. You have Owlette power,(pointing to each child) and you have Owlette power and you have Owlette power. And you have Gekko power (again pointing at each child) and you have Gekko power…..”. And on it went until everyone understood. Then the discussion moved on to a different aspect of the play. For a good 15-20 minutes plans were discussed, dismissed or accepted. Then the actual play started…..for about 5 minutes, then the leader declared “I’m going to go play something else” and that was it. For adults, those 15-20 minutes of planning might be seen as a waste of time. A teacher could have definitely directed the students much more effectively and the play time possible would have lasted longer. But, the participants would have missed out on the most important part of all…the planning. It was in the planning that the real learning took place. The learning to give and take, to express ideas that might get shot down, but then try again with a different idea. These are the real lessons that preschoolers should be learning. Reading, writing, math will all come. But the cooperation and working together is what is really needed in today’s world and preschool is the perfect place to learn it!

But that’s not all we did these last few weeks:

Sensory table play (yes water play in November!)

and from camping, to a picnic, to more squirrel play (notice the squirrel sorted his nuts by color), to more sorting, to a leaf hunt, to playing horses (complete with a stall and feeding trough, not to be confused with an upside down picnic table). Only the leaf hunt had been my idea, the rest was totally theirs.